


monuments to those i used to know

by Suicix



Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Betrayal, Dark, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, M/M, Multi, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4525356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suicix/pseuds/Suicix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seth grieves them, sometimes. Maybe all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monuments to those i used to know

**Author's Note:**

> this is obviously an au, but it's a very ambiguous one. i'm not exactly sure what kind of universe it is precisely, i just let it come out as it wanted to.
> 
> Title from "Dearly Departed" by Young Guns, although this is a sad and angsty fic, and that isn't a sad and angsty song.

They have graves in the cemetery. They have to: otherwise people might have started to look for them. Otherwise, no-one would have known that Dean and Roman are dead.

Sometimes, Seth visits. He shrouds himself in even more black than usual so he can’t be recognised, and he only makes trips there at night-time. It’s perhaps not the wisest thing to do – going to a graveyard at night – but it’s the only time he has. His days are filled with assignments, missions. Orton gets snarly if Seth’s even a couple of minutes late, and Seth knows he can’t make his new partner suspicious. Orton might start sniffing around – or worse: he’d tell Hunter.

Seth doesn’t really think telling Hunter would do much good for Orton, though: it’s not as if their boss wants to hear so much as a word against him – the fresh blood on the scene who took his own team apart from the inside and handed his comrades over just like that. Who ended their lives just like that.

_Just like that._

That’s what it felt like then. Then, it was easy. They both died quickly; Seth was merciful enough not to give them slow deaths. He loved them, after all. Hunter just took it as him wanting to get rid of them as soon as he could. He had nodded when Seth took out that gun and shot right where he’d been taught to for an almost instantaneous death. Dying, they could still try to put up a fight. Dead, they couldn’t.

Now, it’s difficult to even think about the two of them in any state. Dead, dying, _living_.

Living might be the hardest one for Seth. He tries (he tries hard; so, _so_ hard...) to forget any visions of even the smallest things from the past. Being wrapped up in bed with them, whether he’s on the edge or between them both. That shared rush of adrenaline after completing a difficult mission together, the three of them laughing and clinging onto each other because they can’t quite believe they’re alive. Every fleeting moment that Seth remembers has him panicking, has the guilt inside him boiling so hot that it bubbles and burns. He’s beginning to consider the idea of having his memory wiped of them.

He brings it up to Hunter, once.

“Might be good for me,” he says. “Help me focus on the prize at the end of the day, not getting caught up in anything else.”

“You need to remember why you’re doing this. You need to remember what you came from and why you deserve more.”

That’s the end of that, then. No hope for the foul scent of amnesia draught to cloud his lungs and erase at least half of what’s stored up in his brain. He could get some from a black market trader, but he won’t know if that’s any good or not; he’s not an expert regarding elixirs. Like that, he could end up with nothing _but_ the memories of Dean and Roman, and be driven half mad by it in the way that everyone claims Dean is. The way that everyone claims Dean _was_.

So he visits the graves, because that’s all that remains of them: their bodies were never recovered. (Their bodies were tossed into a vat of glowing toxic waste and left there to rot, to become something else. Something half alive, eventually. Something evil, just like he is now. Maybe Seth will see them as Authority drones out on the battlefield one day, mutated and malformed.) He visits the empty graves – _son,_ _brother, friend_ – and pays his respects even though no-one’s actually lying in the coffins beneath the ground. There are names on the gravestones, and that’s good enough for him.

Seth crouches down in front of the two marble headstones, the patches of earth in front of them. They might not actually be there but he can feel them, can feel them everywhere he goes. It was always like that – even when Dean and Roman were still here – but that was different. That was because of the strength of their bond. Their bond that Seth broke. Tore to shreds, actually: shot arrows into every trampled piece of it and set the pieces out to sea. All that in two gunshots.

He’d been promised the world in return, and maybe he has it. But not the world he wants. Just the one he thought he did.


End file.
